Category: Global governance

New World Order against Tariffs: SCO Development Bank as an anti-sanctions tool?

Farwa Sial1 Comment

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO’s) 2025 summit in Tianjin produced a series of outcomes that, although modest in appearance, are strategically significant. The most prominent developments were the agreement in principle to establish an SCO Development Bank, seeded with approximately ¥2 billion in grants and a further ¥10–14 billion in concessional loans from China. The summit also saw Beijing extend access to its BeiDou satellite navigation system to member states, enhancing both civilian and defence applications from aviation and port logistics to military procurement. On the security side, leaders condemned the Pahalgam attack in India, a diplomatic win for India that underscores China’s effort to align with India at a moment when the U.S. has imposed tariffs of up to 50% on Indian exports, citing India’s purchases of Russian oil. These headline measures were complemented by renewed emphasis on counter-terrorism through RATS (the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) and a set of intensified SCO security-council meetings, together signalling a broadening of the organisation’s remit from finance into hard security enablers.

An additional dimension, often overlooked, is the SCO’s latent potential to serve as a platform for India–Pakistan rapprochement. Much as Beijing successfully mediated the Iran–Saudi détente in 2023, the SCO framework offers a structured environment in which India and Pakistan are compelled to engage on shared issues such as counter-terrorism, energy connectivity, and infrastructure finance, under the auspices of a formal multilateralism rather than crude bilateral confrontation. The Tianjin summit’s emphasis on regional security cooperation, and its explicit condemnation of the Pahalgam attack, is already a small step in this direction, reflecting a willingness to acknowledge Indian concerns in a joint forum. With signs that India-China relations have modestly stabilised following high-level military disengagement talks along the LAC, there is space for Beijing to use the SCO to nudge India and Pakistan toward functional cooperation. This is not purely hypothetical: emergent trilateral conversations between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh around trade corridors and energy-grid integration suggest that South Asia’s major economies are beginning to see value in pragmatic coordination despite unresolved disputes. In this sense, the SCO could provide an institutional ecosystem for gradual confidence-building between New Delhi and Islamabad, where shared participation in multilateral projects lowers the political cost of engagement, much as regional institutions elsewhere have historically diluted bilateral rivalries.

In line with a broader shift in global governance, recent commentary by Xinhua portrays the SCO as emblematic of Eurasian agency and multipolar resonance; “a living expression of multipolarity,” bringing together diverse actors under a shared framework of non‑interference, counter‑terrorism, and connectivity. The enrolment of rivals within a single institutional ecosystem, makes the SCO, less of a confrontational bloc and closer to a practical architecture for regional autonomy and development.

Literature on the international financial architecture, has often highlighted the tension between established Western institutions and the alternative arrangements that have grown around them with much of the scholarship focusing on institutional challenges such as the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) or the New Development Bank (NDB). Yet the more subtle processes of institutional layering, where new mechanisms grow alongside existing ones, gradually altering the balance of power have received far less attention.

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How Philanthrocapitalism Will Not Save the World Health Organisation

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In the past two decades, global health governance has undergone a quiet revolution, shaped less by sovereign states and more by the growing influence of private capital. The World Health Organisation (WHO), once envisioned as the democratic engine of international public health, has increasingly come to rely on large-scale philanthropic foundations. This shift toward what is now commonly termed “philanthrocapitalism”—where billionaire-funded entities use business strategies and methods to tackle social and environmental challenges—has profound implications. It is not just a matter of money, but of power, accountability and legitimacy. Amid what many now describe as a global health financing emergency, the WHO’s growing dependence on a handful of wealthy private actors has exposed deep cracks in the system of multilateralism upon which it was founded. Thus, philanthrocapitalism is undermining democratic global health governance by concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy and eroding public accountability.

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G20 must end “outsourcing” of multilateralism

Developing Economics1 Comment

By Charles Abugre and C.P. Chandrasekhar

In multiple ways multilateralism, or the coming together of the international community to further global good, is under challenge today. ‘Conflicts’, not least among them the genocide in Gaza, are an obvious challenge. But there is in the economic sphere a silent subversion of multilateralism underway that also needs to be stalled and reversed. This is the view that the “financing for development challenge” is so huge and the share of the private sector in the holding and disposal of the world’s financial surpluses so large, that it is only private initiative that can successfully implement the programmes needed to realise the SDGs and address damaging climate change.

The corollary of that position is that the role of governments is no more to try and move surpluses from private to public hands (through new forms of international tax cooperation, for example) but to use the available public resources as means to unlock private investments and expenditures. The call is to go beyond the recognition that the tasks of realising the SDGs, ensuring the needed carbon transition, and building resilience the world over, are primarily governmental or ‘public’ responsibilities, and that cooperation among governments (or multilateralism) is the best means to implement those tasks. Pragmatism demands, it is argued, that these tasks and therefore multilateralism, or the conjoint responsibilities of global governments, must be “outsourced”.

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The white saviour industrial complex and global AI governance

Shamira AhmedLeave a comment

In the realm of international development, the ‘white saviour’ trope has long been a subject of critique and controversy. This phenomenon, often rooted in colonialist attitudes, positions Western individuals or entities as benevolent rescuers of non-Western communities, usually without acknowledging or addressing systemic multidimensional inequalities, colonial/racial privilege, and local agency of indigenous communities. The white saviour complex has not only perpetuated harmful stereotypes but has also undermined the efforts and voices of those it claims to help.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a global force to potentially achieve sustainable development goals, we see a new manifestation of the white saviour industrial complex within emerging global AI governance.

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Migration and Trade Explainer

Regions RefocusLeave a comment

The Gender and Trade Coalition was initiated in 2018 by feminist and progressive activists to put forward feminist trade analysis and advocate for equitable trade policy.

This article is the third in a series of short, Q&A format ‘explainers’ unpacking key trade issues produced for the Gender and Trade Coalition by Regions Refocus. It was written by Erica Levenson (Regions Refocus) with inputs from Carol Barton (WIMN) and Catherine Tactaquin (WIMN). The authors give their thanks to Neha Misra (Solidarity Center), Irem Arf (ITUC), Liepollo Lebohang Pheko (Trade Collective), and Mariama Williams (ILE), who reviewed various versions of the article and provided helpful feedback. Read the full article here and catch up on past explainers here.

1.     What Does Trade Have to do With Migration?

The movement of people is a phenomenon as old as human history, and indeed predates nation-states. Migration is not something that begins and ends so much as it is a process, from the roots of the conditions which form the imperative to migrate, to the migration journey, gradual integration, and complex notions of citizenship and identity. This is precisely what makes migration flows a reflection of the social, economic, and political context in which they happen. Modern migration flows, then, reflect the stark structural inequalities that exist in the global economic order. This view correlates to the core-periphery model of migration, which sees migration as the result of acute labor shortages in capitalist centers that need to be filled through migration inflows from peripheries, drawing parallels to the Marxian concept of a reserve army of labor (Sassen-Koob 1981). As feminist scholars have argued, continuous flows of labor power from the Global South to the North are possible not simply due to the will of the Global North, but because institutions in countries of origin facilitate them (Nawyn 2010).

Rather than this core-periphery model of migration, a simplistic push-pull model guides migration provisions in international trade agreements. Informed by neoclassical economics, the push-pull model assumes that migration is the result of micro-level decision making processes that weigh the ‘pros and cons’ of migration, envisioning a simplistic calculation of factors such as perceived wage differentials, employment conditions, and migration costs. Migration is effectively reduced to a household decision meant “to minimize risks to family income or to overcome capital constraints” (Aldaba 2000, 6).

There is a persistent assumption in trade governance that migration and trade are substitutes. Both European Union and United States policymakers have tried to substitute open markets for open immigration policies: to open their markets to exports from states in the Global South in order to reduce migration. This was the explicit goal of former US President George H.W. Bush when he signed NAFTA, and of the EU in liberalizing trade with Northern African states (Campaniello 2014). Simultaneously as the US and EU agreed to liberalize trade, they increased their border policing and passed restrictive migration policies. But these and other free trade agreements have failed to curb migration through substitution because of a key flaw in their assumption: that increasing free trade leads to increases in GDP and wages in developing countries. In fact, quite the opposite is true– trade liberalization has severely hindered the economies of developing countries. Consequently, free trade agreements have actually increased migration in the long-term (Orefice 2013).

There is a clear gap in structural understandings of the relationship between trade and migration and a need to challenge the ideologies of the people governing them. It is high time to acknowledge the many unfulfilled promises which have been hung on trade liberalization and the socioeconomic catastrophes it has instead led to (Aguinaga et al. 2013; Benería, Deere, and Kabeer 2012; Flynn and Kofman 2004; Hannah, Roberts, and Trommer 2021; Harrison 1997). A critical feminist analysis of the relationship between trade and migration points out the numerous connections between deeply unequal trade and migration governance regimes and illuminates urgent areas in need of improvement.

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A Multilateral International Monetary System

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By Paulo L. dos Santos and Devika Dutt

“One of the chief contributions to peace that the Bretton Woods program offers is that it will free the small and even the middle-sized nations from the danger of economic aggression by more powerful neighbours. The lesser nation will no longer be obliged to look to a single powerful country for monetary support or capital for development, and have to make dangerous political and economic concessions in the process. Political independence in the past has often proved to be sham when economic independence did not go with it.” —Henry Morgenthou Jr (1945)

The world economy has a Dollar problem. Reliance on the currency of a single country as the world’s chief way to organise trade, carry out financial settlements, and store value creates a series of inequitable economic imbalances and policy tensions—both within the US and across the global economy. It bestows disproportionate economic and political power on the US government and financial institutions; exposes world trade and finance to instability and disruptions originating in the Dollar zone; imposes huge costs on the world’s small and even middle-sized nations; and fuels disproportionate growth in the US financial sector, bolstering its influence in that country’s political economy.

A Historical Problem

This problem is not new. In fact, the inability to develop an equitable and genuinely multilateral international monetary system is one of capitalism’s most striking institutional failures, going back to the early days of the industrial revolution. The gold standard of that time and its successors have always privileged some economies at the expense of others, and created policy biases favouring the interests of creditors and capital, at the expense of debtors and wage earners. 

Only once in the history of capitalism did policy-makers from leading capitalist powers even consider the possibility of building a genuinely multilateral, equitable system: during the 1943-44 debates on the post-World-War-II economic order. But despite the aspirations and statements of participants like John M Keynes and then-US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthou Jr, the Bretton Woods conference led to the creation of a system centred on the US Dollar, under which foreign central banks could present dollars to the Federal Reserve for exchange into gold. 

That system effectively charged US authorities with the supply of the world’s ultimate international reserves. In this task they were constrained only by the willingness of central banks in other states to hold Dollars instead of gold. As French Finance Minister Giscard d’Estaing put it in the 1960s, this arrangement defined an exorbitant privilege for the US economy, which enjoyed a lot of space for effectively issuing Dollars to acquire goods and assets overseas.

By the late 1960s, it became clear that the US economy could no longer uphold its obligations under the Bretton Woods system. Its steady loss of competitiveness in international trade, fiscal pressures from its protracted, losing war in Vietnam, and increases in social spending in response to domestic political turmoil, led to growing trade deficits, mass outflows of Dollars, and concerns that US authorities would not be able to meet foreign demand for convertibility of greenbacks into gold. In response, the US unilaterally abandoned its commitment to convertibility in 1971.

Coming amidst a series of successful national liberation and anti-colonial struggles across the world, the US’s inability to sustain the Bretton Woods system fed hopes that a new, equitable international monetary order could be constructed. The 1974 call by the United Nations for a New International Economic Order explicitly pointed to the need for a new monetary system centered on the “promotion of the development of the developing countries and the adequate flow of real resources to them” as means to dismantle “the remaining vestiges of colonial domination” and removing the obstacles in the way of international convergence in measures of economic development and living standards.

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Multilateral Development Banks: A system of Debt or Development?

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By Susan Engel and Adrian Bazbauers

Most people interested in development know about the World Bank and probably some of the bigger regional development banks, like the Asian Development Bank. But few people realise there is a system of 30 functioning multilateral development banks (MDBs). Indeed, we did not initially realise there were quite so many because there was no comprehensive tally or an academic study analysing them all. We set out to explore whether the MDBs work as a system and what role they play in promoting both debt and development so here is a short summary of some of our key finding on these three issues.

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Reflections on aid and regime change in Ethiopia: a response to Cheeseman

Andrew M. Fischer1 Comment

By Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann

In a piece, published on 22 December 2020, that he describes as the most important thing he wrote in 2020, Nic Cheeseman penned a strong criticism of what he calls the ‘model of authoritarian development’ in Africa. This phrase refers specifically to Ethiopia and Rwanda, the only two countries that fit the model, which is otherwise not generalisable to the rest of the continent. His argument, in a nutshell, is that donors have been increasingly enamoured with these two countries because they are seen as producing results. Yet the recent conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia shows that this argument needs to be questioned and discarded. He calls for supporting democracy in Africa, which he claims performs better in the long run than authoritarian regimes, especially in light of the conflicts and repression that inevitably emerge under authoritarianism. His argument could also be read as an implicit call for regime change, stoking donors to intensify political conditionalities on these countries before things get even worse.

Cheeseman’s argument rests on a number of misleading empirical assertions which have important implications for the conclusions that he draws. In clarifying these, our point is not to defend authoritarianism. Instead, we hope to inject a measure of interpretative caution and to guard against opportunistically using crises to fan the disciplinary zeal of donors, particularly in a context of increasingly militarised aid regimes that have been associated with disastrous ventures into regime change.

We make two points. First, his story of aid dynamics in Ethiopia is not supported by the data he cites, which instead reflect the rise of economic ‘reform’ programmes pushed by the World Bank and IMF. The country’s current economic difficulties also need to be placed in the context of the systemic financial crisis currently slamming the continent, in which both authoritarian and (nominally) democratic regimes are faring poorly.

Second, we reflect on Cheeseman’s vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Within already stringent economic adjustment programmes, his call for intensifying political conditionalities amounts to a Good Governance Agenda 2.0. It ignores the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes in subverting deliberative governance on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s. 

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